Page 70 of Near Miss

Beckett’s eyes find my mouth and he lowers to meet it.

My lips part for his tongue. We kiss and kiss and kiss. My hands scramble across the planes of his back, the ridges and valleys of his shoulders. All of me lights up when he breaks away and one of those beautiful, wonderous hands pulls down my top and his teeth scrape my nipple.

I arch into him when that other hand grips my rib cage. His tongue still swirls, and I pant when that other hand moves to my hip, bruising it before it tugs down my shorts, scoring down the centre of me—moving up and down and soaking itself before moving in these circles that make me want to die a bit and have me saying his name over and over, like maybe it’s a prayer that the real Beckett will hear and know he’s wonderful and lovely and good.

That maybe the way he makes me say his name with something I can only describe as reverence will breathe life back into him.

And while I pray and pray and pray that I can give him oxygen, he tosses my clothes aside with that forgotten book, and my hands scramble to get rid of his underwear, too, so I can touch all of him. I do, but just for a moment, before he’s rolling a condom on, angling above me just so, and pushing into me with a groan.

We always pause here—his forehead against mine, ragged breath and his pupils blown—before he starts to move.

Tonight, he rolls his hips just twice before wrapping an arm around my shoulders and flipping over so I’m on top of him.

His hands find my waist, his eyes on me, lips parted and hair askew. We start to move at the same time and he pushes his head back into the pillow, a groan catching in his throat when I tip mine back, fingers digging into his chest.

I have these lines and these boundaries and my brain screams at me—but there’s this other small, quiet, maybe beautiful part of me that whispers something else. I think it’s my heart. It’sbeating, but I think it whispers to me that maybe, I should give it to him.

That I could carve this other vital organ from my body and place it in his hands and he’d keep it safe.

On nights like these, I almost believe it.

I moan his name, I pray for him, and his hands hold me and I think they ask me to please, please, open for him.

And so it goes.

Greer

Rav asked me to think about the sometimes, and the other times—when I love my job, and when I hate my job.

We didn’t start the session that way the last time I was there because I was too busy spreading the word about Napoleon, and I’ve been too busy since being spread out by Beckett to really give it much thought.

But that’s not terribly friendly, and it’s not in my nature to leave homework incomplete, so I locked myself in an available on-call room and drew a line down a scrap piece of paper, like I could somehow reduce whatever it is inside me that broke all those years ago to a pros and cons list.

I tap my pen against the top of the page.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when I started feeling a bit like a thief.

I didn’t feel like a thief this morning when I put a new kidney in someone who spent their whole life attached to a dialysis machine.

But a page comes in on my phone, my chest constricts, and I feel a bit like one now.

My least favourite kind of page.

There are different types of organ donation—and most people don’t realize that the majority of what we do is because of living donations. Only about one-to-two percent of donors are deceased, and within that tiny, infinitesimal percentage, there are two different kinds.

Organ donation after circulatory death, when your heart stops, and after neurological determination of death, when your brain does.

It’s one of the most beautiful things to me—that people have made this choice in life that allows them to save other people after they’re gone.

But for some reason, it hurts me the most.

I think it might be because it reminds me that I’m a hypocrite—to allegedly be dedicated to saving lives, but once upon a time, I was just a little girl wishing on a star that someone else, somewhere on the planet, lost theirs.

Inhaling, I drop the phone against the desk. The invisible clock starts—there isn’t always long to do a harvest and I need to go.

But the phone starts vibrating, and my stomach twists for an entirely different reason when I see the name on the screen.

“Dad?” My fingers slip when I pick it up.

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